[tor-reports] Damian's Status Report - April 2014

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all. This April's status report is gonna be short and sweet. The bulk of my
time went toward Google Summer of Code student selection. I'm delighted to
announce that we have thirteen great students working with us this summer
(twelve with Tor and one with the EFF)! This is twice as many as last year,
so it will be interesting to see if we can manage it.

  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/gsoc

This concludes the bulk of my work as the org admin, so this next month I
should be able to focus back on writing sweet, sweet code.

On April 26th I presented at LinuxFest Northwest. For those who haven't seen
it, this was a repeat of my TA3M 'Tor Ecosystem' presentation...

  http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/2014/sessions/tor-ecosystem-developers-guide-contributing-tor-project
  https://media.torproject.org/video/2013-11-t3am-damian-johnson.mp4

And last but not least, bit by bit I've been picking away at a feature branch
for Stem. It's not quite ready yet, but expect an announement and a new Stem
release sometime in May. One improvement that *is* now available though is
the following:

  The connection module's connect_port() and connect_socket_file() functions
  have been deprecated in favor of a new, slicker connect().

  https://stem.torproject.org/api/connection.html#stem.connection.connect

This new function is quite a bit smarter about the error responses it
provides, and is more intuitive to use.

Cheers! -Damian